Ron Wommack, the civic-minded architect whose modern residences are a familiar presence in Dallas neighborhoods, died at his home in Farmers Branch on Sunday at the age of 73. His last words were about architecture, according to his wife, Joylyn Niebes Wommack.
News of his death elicited an outpouring of emotion within Dallas architecture circles and on social media. “A genuinely fun and endearing man who loved architecture and design and architects with abandon,” the architect Michael Malone wrote on Facebook. “A loss to the architectural community and to our community at large. His work simultaneously fit in and stood out,” longtime Dallas arts advocate Veletta Lill wrote on Instagram.
Wommack was born in 1950 in Fort Worth but spent most of his youth in Abilene. He studied architecture at Texas Tech, graduating in 1976, and began his career working at two of the most influential firms in Dallas, first in the office of Frank Welch and then at the Oglesby Group. Both firms practiced a form of gentle modernism attuned to the traditions and landscape of Texas. For a young professional it was an ideal beginning, the Dallas architectural equivalent of studying under Frank Sinatra and Aretha Franklin.
He established his own firm in 1990, adopting the principles he had absorbed under Welch and at the Oglesby Group — especially a sensitivity to light and nature — and merging them into a more purist modern style.
The house he built for himself, a composition of concrete, glass and steel in a nondescript area west of Oak Lawn, exhibited a moderated industrial aesthetic seen in much of his work. The house won an award from the Dallas chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 2008. “It’s beautiful without any sense of decadence,” the architect Thom Mayne wrote in the jury citation.
Working with developer Alan McDonald in the late 1990s, Wommack replaced a series of run-down garden-style apartments in Oak Lawn with rows of handsome modern townhouses. In its 1999 guide to Dallas architecture, the AIA credited those projects with spurring a “neighborhood renaissance.”
“They have a very bright, cheerful countenance,” architect Max Levy, a longtime friend and colleague, said of those projects. “He didn’t just give them a look. He would bring in light, he would adjust proportions. ... They were about people.”
In 2002, Dallas Morning News architecture critic David Dillon placed Wommack in a small group of architects — among them Levy, Gary “Corky” Cunningham, Joe McCall and Cliff Welch — developing a “genuine architectural culture” in Dallas. In 2006, the Dallas chapter of the AIA named his practice its firm of the year.
Tall and bearded, Wommack made for an imposing presence, but in person he was as open and humane as his architecture. “Ron just had this unsinkable spirit,” Levy said. “In almost every architectural gathering in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, whether it was a lecture or a panel or a tour, there was Ron.”
From 2003 to 2005, Wommack was president of the Dallas Architectural Forum. “This is a huge loss for the Dallas architecture community,” said Nate Eudaly, the forum’s executive director. “He was a brilliant man and a true philosopher.”
Most recently Wommack had been devoting his energies to an effort to form an architecture school in the city of Dallas. “He had the energy to do amazing things,” Niebes Wommack said.
Wommack’s cause of death has yet to be determined. Details of a public memorial service are forthcoming.
